this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2026
322 points (97.9% liked)
Technology
82669 readers
2394 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Nothing is free. All free services are using your data somehow.
If you’re not the customer, you’re the product.
In this case, it was mostly children’s data.
Except most free and open-source software, major open knowledge bases, literally the social media service you're using to communicate this point right now...
While understandable when talking about services by for-profit corporations, this talking point without that context is oversimplified to the point of being obnoxious in a world where I can set up a desktop OS with a fully featured environment and software suite then go browse a social media site where at no stage was anything free where I was the product.
Edit: Moreover, an arguably worse problem with this saying in 2026 is that it implies (doesn't outright state, but implies to an uninformed reader) that paid services can save them from this, which these days is almost universally untrue.
Yeah, revised version:
If you're not paying you're the product. If you are paying you're still the product and paying for the privilege*.
Humm, that's not as pithy.
Yeah, I didn’t think I needed to make clear I meant with for profit companies.
True for Corps but not everything
Pokémon Go already has multiple revenue streams, including direct in-app purchases.
I think you are forgetting that Niantic made a lot of money off Pokémon GO, not ALL the money, ergo its an abject failure under capitalism and they need to pump up those numbers.
If they had been making ALL the money they might have been satisfied, for a quarter. Then they would have packaged and sold all that data for more than ALL the money.
Yeah, but many players don’t pay, especially the huge player bases of children. They can subsidise that by selling your data.
Pokemon go has been extremely profitable, the free to play model works. They don't need to subsidize shit.
Free to play games work by being pay2win and by catering to whales. Sorry but you are wrong.
I’ve been in software design and development for decades. Sorry, but you are wrong.
The reason these companies are so profitable is because they sell your data.
Whales are fine, but that’s not their only revenue stream. People freely give up their data to them and that’s stupidly valuable. If you think these companies aren’t selling it, you’re very naive.
I'm a data engineer, ofc I know that. But you were excusing it as if their service has costs. That's bs, because their reported earnings that done without whatever profit they are going to gain from this harvest of train data already were very profitable.
That's why I said you were in the wrong. Not because you expected them to sell everything they could, so did I, but because you justified that behaviour from the free to play model. That model exists in plenty games that are extremely successful without harvesting things beyond metadata.
I wasn’t justifying it. Perhaps that came across the wrong way.
They’re selling shit they never asked their users does that’s bullshit, and should be illegal. Especially with children’s data.
My point was they’re doing it.
You guys agree and it's just the word "subsidy" he has an issue with because subsidies have the connotation of helping actual people.
I don't expect most people still playing Pokémon go are actually kids 😅 I could be wrong, but as someone playing it until pretty recenly and who had friends who still played it at various points I don't think its really popular with kids anymore
In Singapore, it's mostly the elderly. I saw a guy a few days ago with two phones playing it as he descended an escalator. The especially keen ones use four or five phones at a time.
Even at release the majority were adults
Is the fediverse free?
Again, I meant for profit companies., like Nintendo.
Volunteer led orgs are different. Particularly those run by socialists.
Yay, thanks
While the admins and donations make it free, I guarantee there's at least a few corporations or government organizations out there scraping the fediverse to gather data. So even though the people hosting it might not have any bad intentions, an open platform like this will still feed the data hungry machine.
Saturday I was looking up bottles and raftvr, one of the links brought me back to LEMMY!!!
Even if the data comes from kids, it's not identifiable or personal. It could loosely fall under unpaid child labour if the in-game task is actually just a job in disguise.